Drawing on the last four years of his most recent ethnographic research in Port-au-Prince's most destitute and brutally violent slum of Cité Soleil, the chapter provides an anthropological assessment of the root causes, net effects, and social consequences of the rapid armament and militarization of Cité Soleil's youth, and their loose organization into "clans" - gangs of street toughs who wield absolute power with impunity in their ghetto strongholds. The chapter details the casual atrocities they perpetrate on the civil society with their stockpiles of Glock handguns, Israeli Galils, MAC-11 machine-pistols, and Chinese knock-off AK-47s. Supported by fieldwork he conducted in 2009 and again in 2011 alongside child soldiers who frequently engaged in firefights with rival clans over control of the Balkanized warrens of rutted footpaths and sewage-clogged canals that transect the slum that has become their battlefield, he articulates (often in the chillingly indifferent words of the children themselves) the ways in which a distinctive gun culture has rapidly emerged as a powerful force of socialization among adolescents in a slum that the Chief of UN Military Operations in Haiti has called "the most dangerous place on earth."
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